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Steven Wilson
Get in time with the nu-prog superstar.
By Tom Doyle.
Welcome to the machine: Steven Wilson gets out of his tree.
Kevin Westenberg, Gilles Petard Getty
STEVEN WILSON’s apartness was almost baked in from the start. As a teenage home recording enthusiast in Hemel Hempstead in the 1980s, he asked his electronics engineer father to build him a sequencer. “Because my dad wasn’t a musician,” Wilson recalled to MOJO in 2022, “he didn’t know that most music is in four. So I was presented with this nine-step sequencer.” If the device made the 4/4 norm impossible, it lent itself to proggier signatures. “Maybe one of the reasons I love different time signatures and polyrhythms,” reckoned Wilson, “is because I had to write everything in multiples of three and nine.”
It was but one element of Steven Wilson’s creative process that would define his late-’80s, early-’90s outsiderdom: self-releasing cassettes as the fantasy prog band Porcupine Tree, pairing with singer Tim Bowness as the underrated post-dance duo No-Man. Then, as PT became a real group, struggling to connect with indie rock audiences while increasingly appealing to the underground prog masses, Wilson grew disenchanted, put the group on indefinite hiatus in 2010 (broken briefly by 2022’s return LP, Closure/ Continuation), and concentrated on a solo career.
Wilson’s entire catalogue has been characterised by restlessness, even if his core influences have remained constant (Pink Floyd, King Crimson, XTC and their psychedelic offshoot The Dukes Of Stratosphear, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel). Moreover, two records in his parents’ collection during his childhood seemed to have informed everything: namely, The Dark Side Of The Moon and Donna Summer’s 1975 album Love To Love You Baby.
“My musical DNA: grooves, pop, repetition, sound design, the album as a journey.”